Stories by Andrew Hamlin

Out-and-proud punk-poppers Pansy Division hit Soda Bar November 4. Co-founder Chris Freeman took some email queries. What are the band’s most memorable San Diego gigs? “Opening for Green Day at the Sports Arena on Halloween ...

Drummer Terry Bozzio’s survived playing with Frank Zappa, Jeff Beck, and a slew of prog-rock lineups. He brings a concert-length solo performance on “the world’s largest tuned drum and percussion” set to Dizzy’s on October ...

Cyndi Lauper’s sung R&B, electronica, classics, obscurities, and picked up a Grammy and a Tony for writing the Kinky Boots musical. She brings her new country album, Detour, to Humphreys by the Bay October 3 ...

Still catchy, still creepy, still obsessive, still (mostly) masked, still rocking the white-framed cat’s-eye sunglasses he’s favored for decades, longtime San Diego resident Gary Wilson has a new album out, Friday Night with Gary Wilson, ...

Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler, having spent many years with the psychedelic hiphop team Shabazz Palaces, reunited with his earlier band, Digable Planets, for their first tour since 2005. They land at Belly Up on August 20. ...

How the British pop band still records, tours without a dedicated guitarist

Duran Duran, still Duranimal after all these years, brings their new multimedia blitz and their new album, Paper Gods, to the Sleep Train Amphitheatre Tuesday, August 2. From his home near Hammersmith, London, drummer Roger ...

When not writing, singing, sharing one-act plays or investigating psychic phenomena (see below), Sonny Smith from Sonny & the Sunsets stumps for his new album Moods Baby Moods. The band hits Soda Bar on the ...

Pop songs become springboards. Into the air, a double-flip, then deep down.

Coltrane was dead. And flautist Herbie Mann's band didn't boast the jaw-dropping hive mind of Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet. What Mann had was a splendid band of creative misfits. Among others: incendiary guitarist Sonny ...

From the streets of Jersey City came guitarist Al Di Meola, who toiled in the fusion group Return to Forever, at age 20, and eventually went solo, combining rock, jazz, classical, and electronic approaches. He ...

In 1987, R. Budd Dwyer, state treasurer of Pennsylvania, climaxed a press conference by killing himself with a revolver. Filter’s signature tune, the facetious-but-still-regretful “Hey Man Nice Shot,” released in 1995, is about Dwyer, who ...

The Residents are not who you think they are — wait, who do you think they are?

Two key points about the Residents: nobody knows who they are after 40-plus years (though they’ve taken to calling the three people on stage “Randy, Chuck, and Bob”), and they always employ masks, costumes, and ...

“You’re not my friend/ and that is fine,” croak-warbles David Thomas for starters. Circa 35 years ago, longtime Thomas-watcher Greil Marcus summed up the then-new music of Thomas’s Pere Ubu band, as someone who’d been ...

Heavier, and, I must say, humbler than ever, San Diego’s own Joy comes fulminating back with their latest platter, Ride Along! Originator Zachary Oakley took some queries via email. The new album’s out on 4/29. ...

Third Eye Blind took six years between their last album, Ursa Major, and their new platter, Dopamine, owing in large part to leader Stephan Jenkins’s struggles with writer’s block, a problem he tried to cure, ...

Even the most conceptually aggregated rock bands usually stop short of creating their own language. Call them prog, call them avant-garde, call them way out, but Magma founder Christian Vander took that plunge decades ago, ...

Eleanor Friedberger first went around the world as half of the Fiery Furnaces, which cut nine albums covering almost every base of Western music. The band went on hiatus in 2011. Friedberger comes to the ...

“He lost his arm in an arm accident,” as the noted futurist Mike Hamrick noted about Def Leppard’s drummer Rick Allen — but that’s left Allen stronger. Given pedals to cover his missing left appendage, ...

From the residue of Seattle band Pretty Girls Make Graves, the Cave Singers arose in 2007. Now they’re touring their fifth album and first crowd-sourced recording project, Banshee. They play the Casbah on Sunday, February ...

From the Ben Folds Five through solo projects and rubbing shoulders with William Shatner, Regina Spektor, and Weird Al Yankovic, pianist/composer Ben Folds likes to keep folks head-scratching. In concert with the San Diego Symphony, ...

Singer, songwriter, keyboardist Vanessa Carlton brings her new stark tunes from her album Liberman to the Casbah on Sunday, January 24. She took questions over email on working with producer Steve Osborne (New Order, U2), ...

Art Alexakis, leader of Everclear, brings the band to the Music Box on Saturday, November 21. Alexakis took time out from hunting down a Starbucks in Greensboro, North Carolina, to take a few phoner questions. ...

The Cult, fronted by Ian Astbury, invades House of Blues on November 19, stumping for their new album Hidden City, the final installment in a three-album trilogy. Astbury took questions over the phone — and ...

Shirley Manson’s back together with her Garbage bandmates Butch Vig, Duke Erikson, and Steve Marker. They hit Humphreys Concerts by the Bay on October 6. She took some trans-Atlantic phone questions from the Reader. What ...

Something burning this white hot, might out-vie language itself. For those joining us late, the Sonics started out in Tacoma, Washington, as teenagers. They invented punk rock — and anyone who doesn’t believe that can ...

Lou Barlow talks about Brace the Wave and this week's gig at his beloved Casbah

Lou Barlow grew up in Massachusetts and stumbled into Dinosaur Jr., which helped define an era of alternative rock when they weren’t marinating in backstage passive-aggression. Solo, Barlow started Sebadoh, pioneered the entire “lo-fi” thing, ...

Aussie noisemaker Adam Harding enlists American allies for new record, Belly Up show

Dumb Numbers’ Adam Harding, late of Australia, likes to make music with his funky friends, who include the Melvins, David Lynch, and Jesus Lizard’s David Yow — when he isn’t shooting videos with many of ...

“Mister Sister,” hymn to a cross-dressing or possibly transgendered “you” who escapes to “everyone’s party wish list,” makes even more sense in the wake of the Surpreme Court decision in June, which applied specifically to ...

Disco! Disco! Disco! Okay, provisional disco. With Andy (of all people) Taylor of Duran Duran at the board and onboard with song scribbling, the world’s two most creatively obnoxious long-in-the-tooth juvenile miscreants spend a half-hour ...

"Yeah, he was always a Country Dick kind of guy. He lived and died rock and roll.”

San Diego’s Eliot Wilder fooled around Grossmont High and then L.A. and ended up in Boston. His latest work, Quartet, fuses classical and hip-hop. He took questions over email. What was the music scene like ...

OK Go pop-rocks stunning, single-take videos featuring everything from wait-a-minute optical illusions to chorus lines on Honda electric mini-scooters. They play House of Blues on May 1. Drummer Dan Konopka took some email questions. What ...

That leadoff track adds up everything in its unequal-length verses, the pieces of a life, the happier bits fallen out, rotten pieces in a too-humid jigsaw — and every equation equals no peace. That’s the ...

Having gigged with everyone from Robyn Hitchcock to R.E.M., Scott McCaughey brings his Minus 5 to Balboa Theatre downtown on March 24. He took some email questions from the Reader. What San Diego music memories ...